As the article points out, using collected client data is problematic, because some errors will often be undetectable, as in numeric data. And in general, you would have to control for bit flips somehow caused by software.

I wonder whether a SETI approach would be useful here. Allocate, say, 1MB of memory. Fill it with some known bit pattern. Periodically check the memory and look for discrepancies. Do this once an hour, on 10M devices, and that is a LOT of monitoring. Report discrepancies along with time, location (including elevation), hardware and OS information.

I would think that this approach would provide a lot of interesting information about when and where bit flips occur, especially when matched against information on solar and atmospheric events (as in the article). Perhaps sensitive hardware and OS environments would be detected. Even completely negative results would be interesting: no bit flips observed would suggest that purported bit flips elsewhere might have other explanations.